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Leeds city centre street marshalls launched
Police in Leeds have launched a more targeted approach to city centre disorder at weekends.
Rod McPhee spent a Saturday night patrolling with officers to see it in action.
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It's 10.30pm on Woodhouse Lane and an inebriated girl of 21 is slumped outside of Yates's bar – an ambulance is on its way. It's not exactly a rare sight or a particularly worrying scenario, or at least it might seem that way.
She's just been escorted off the premises and is not only very drunk (friends accompanying her say she's hardly eaten all day and downed a bottle of wine before she left the house), she doesn't seem in any mood to cooperate.
She's lying very close to the entrance to the bar where dozens of people are queueing to get in and trying to get out. She's also blocking the pavement, forcing other punters to walk into the road and the path of oncoming traffic.
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It's possibly the worst place to have any kind of scuffle, which is a real danger since medics who try to help the patient – who, it turns out, is also deaf – are greeted with the universal sign language of two raised fingers.
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A comparatively trivial event suddenly starts to look potentially unpleasant.
Fortunately police community support officers Nick Hammill and Adam Lawson arrive and just the sight of a luminous jacket is enough to smooth things over and the girl is quickly taken to hospital.
"It's been a warm day and a lot of people have been drinking throughout the afternoon," says PCSO Hammill. "Which is good on one level because it means that some of those will go home earlier.
"But it also means that there'll be a lot more on the streets who are a good deal more drunk, and with the case of this girl that's what you've got basically. If she's like this at 10.30 at night she must have been at it for a while or been drinking quite a lot in a short space of time."
The officers clearly know their patch and the revellers who inhabit it. Under a new scheme, Operation Capital, they're two of a team of 15 sent to patrol Woodhouse Lane – one of Leeds's hotspots for drunken violence and disorder.
It includes some of the biggest and busiest bars and nightclubs in the city – Tiger Tiger, Bar Risa, Yates's, Oceana, to name a few. This concentrated approach has just been set up by Chief Inspector Vernon Francis, boss of city centre policing in Leeds.
Overall it uses three similar-sized teams to target three major scenes of trouble – Woodhouse Lane, New Briggate and the Exchange Quarter – using an increased number of officers to provide more comprehensive cover on a Friday and Saturday night.
The teams start their night in each zone and, most importantly, stay there. They're also more visible and more approachable because they're on foot, rather than merely passing through in a patrol car.
Plus they stagger their shifts to coincide with the opening and closing hours of the nearby venues. On Woodhouse Lane, for example, they start patrols early, while over on New Briggate it is later because it has more takeaways and taxi offices.
This is different to previous strategies which relied on a very small number of regular police officers responding to trouble across the city. The aim here is to concentrate efforts in the worst areas and be more preventative.
To that end they've doubled the recruits of special constables and been able to put more PCSOs on patrol in these hotspots now they have greater back up from a rise in regular police officers.
But the biggest change is the introduction of street marshalls.
In the first innovation of its kind in the UK, Chief Insp Francis has asked local businesses who rely on the nighttime economy to effectively chip in to help with policing their streets. Nowhere else in Britain do venues entirely foot the bill – and all but one venue said yes to joining the scheme.
On Woodhouse Lane tonight there are four representatives, supplied courtesy of Tiger Tiger, Bar Risa, Yates's and McDonald's. They pay for the street marshalls, invariably door staff from their venues, to act as intermediaries between what happens inside bars, clubs and takeaways and what takes place outside.
"The trouble up to now has been this us-and-them set up." says Chief Insp Francis. "So door staff are responsible for what goes on inside venues, whereas it becomes the problem of the police and the wider public if it comes outside the premises.
"And not only does that not work it simply isn't fair. So street marshalls are the link between the two. They have a responsibility to try and nip problems in the budl."
A perfect example of this arises at about midnight. A man who looks to be in his 30s has just been thrown out of Bar Risa after several complaints from fellow punters about his intoxicated behaviour.
He tells door staff he's going to "call up some boys and get them to come down here with guns" then starts taking pictures of the bouncers on his mobile phone camera.
Under normal circumstances they would have to watch helplessly as he throws abuse at the door staff. But before the PCSO comes on the scene, street marshall Jon Andrews has already intervened. He's normally working as a doorman on the entrance to Bar Risa.
"It works because I'm not confined to one spot." he says. "I can come outside and there's so much more I can do. I can take someone to one side so they aren't making a scene or causing bother to anyone else, I can speak to them and warn them about their behaviour.
"I can also warn other venues not to let him in if he decides to try and get in somewhere else, or I can get the city centre CCTV trained on him and if that fails I can always get help from the police who are only a call away.
"Before the street marshalls scheme existed I couldn't really do that, not to that extent. We would just have to turf him out."
Although the man in question initially seems quite undaunted by the interventions, he eventually departs with his tail between his legs. And most troublemakers appear to be put off by the sight of anyone wearing a luminous yellow jacket.
Chief Insp Francis acknowledges high visibility is half the battle. Simply being aware of a police presence appears to be enough to deter. And that's born out in the new statistics.
In an average weekend West Yorkshire Police usually have to deal with anything up to 20 assaults in the city centre. Last weekend there were just two recorded assaults, both of them inside venues. Nothing was reported outside.
But just being present isn't always enough. Trouble can still spill onto the streets but the new teams can stop it before it escalates.
On New Briggate police arrive just in time as they find groups of taxi drivers outside a nearby office who appear to be squaring up to each other over a dispute, but the tension is quickly relieved by officers and the stand-off ends before it really begins.
Overseeing the running of all the teams is Sgt Martin Mynard. He acknowledges it isn't always that easy.
"If two blokes want to have a fight with each other and they come out of a club or a pub intent on a punch-up they won't be put off by the presence of a yellow jacket of any kind," he says.
"But if we can be in there as quickly as possible then we can split them up and defuse the situation before it turns really nasty. We have a certain amount of discretion which allows us to do that.
"If we aren't there then things get worse and someone gets their jaw broken, well, our hands are tied. Someone has to be arrested and they're facing a serious assault charge."
Saturday turns out to be a relatively quiet night. It may be the result of Operation Capital. It may be luck. But the latter seems unlikely as the heart of Leeds is packed with punters making the most of one of the warmest summer nights of the year.
There's also been a huge dance event at Temple Newsam which saw thousands of revellers poor into the city centre from 11pm.
The potential for trouble is huge yet the police, finally, appear to have the city centre under some kind of control.
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Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
